Have you ever fallen flat on your face when you're carrying an ice cream? Or put down a drink gone back to get it & it's nowhere to be seen? That's the Odds at work! A family of Professional Pranksters who delight in playing the most rib-tickling tricks on the townspeople of Trott. This time the Odds face inspection by the Head Prankster to ensure they're still up to their meddling best. But the new man who'll be doing it is none other than Mr Nobody sworn enemy of Mr Odd! This calls for a spectacular pranking plan...A hilarious second book about a fabulously funny family from Adam Perrott. Your sides will be splitting as you read about their outrageous pranks. The Odds will delight both boys & girls with their comic capers & super-high levels of silliness. ...

Stephen Fry believes that if you can speak & read English you can write poetry. But it is no fun if you don't know where to start or have been led to believe that Anything Goes. Stephen who has long written poems & indeed has written long poems for his own private pleasure invites you to discover the incomparable delights of metre rhyme & verse forms. Whether you want to write a Petrarchan sonnet for your lover's birthday an epithalamion for your sister's wedding or a villanelle excoriating the government's housing policy The Ode Less Travelled will give you the tools & the confidence to do so. Brimful of enjoyable exercises witty insights & simple step-by-step advice The Ode Less Travelled" guides the reader towards mastery & confidence in the Mother of the Arts." ...

In the long hot Roman Summer of AD74 Marcus Didius Falco private informer & spare-time poet gives a reading for his family & friends. Things get out of hand as usual. The event is taken over by Aurelius Chrysippus a wealthy Greek banker & patron to a group of struggling writers who offers to publish Falcos work
- a golden opportunity that rapidly palls. A visit to the Chrysippusscriptorium implicates him in a gruesome literary murder so when Petronius Longus the over-worked vigiles enquiry chief commissions him to investigate Falco is forced to accept. Lindsey Davis twelfth novel wittily explores Roman publishing & banking taking us from the jealousies of authorship & the mire of patronage to the darker financial world where default can have fatal consequences...
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Earth hath not anything to show more fair said Wordsworth of London in 1802 & hundreds of years on the same can be still be said of Britains largest metropolis. Ode to London is a wonderful anthology of poetry celebrating Englands capital & life as a Londoner. Verses from our best-loved authors such as William Wordsworth William Blake & John Betjeman among others are accompanied by beautiful illustrations
- often taken from iconic tube posters
- of Londons famous sights green parks & Londoners in their daily lives. Epic poems celebrating Londons vast & majestic presence sit alongside Cockney ditties about pie mash & jellied eels in this new collection. Celebrating every aspect of the big smoke
- from the Houses of Parliament & the Blitz spirit through to red double-decker buses & infamous rainy English summers
- this is the perfect gift for any Londoner or visitor to the city. Other successful titles in the series include Ode to the Countryside (9781905400959) & Ode to the Sea (9781907892141).



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* Some of the best poetry ever written in celebration of the English countryside * From Shakespeare to Coleridge to Betjeman *



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Nazi Germanys fall is regularly depicted through the dual images of Adolf Hitler directing the final battle for Berlin from his claustrophobic Fuhrerbunker & the subsequent Soviet victory immortalized by the flying of the Hammer & Sickle over the burnt-out Reichstag. This popular view that Germanys last battle of World War II was a deliberate yet fatalistic defense of Berlin planned & conducted by Hitler is largely a historically inaccurate depiction that fits a popularized characterization of the Third Reichs end. Germanys final battle began when Generaloberst Gotthard Heinrici took command of Heeresgruppe Weichsel (Army Group Vistula) on 20 March 1945 not when the massive Soviet offensive intended to capture Berlin was launched on 16 April. Heinrici not Hitler decided that there was only one strategic course left for Germany-hold the Soviets back along the Oder Front long enough to entice the Western Allies across the Elbe River. Heinrici knew two things: the war was lost & what remained of Germany was destined for postwar Soviet occupation. His intent was that a protracted defense along the Oder Front would force General Eisenhower to order the Western Allies into the postwar Soviet Zone of Occupation outlined in the Top Secret Allied Plan known as Eclipse thereby sparing millions of Germans in the east the dismal fate of Soviet vengeance everyone knew was at h&. Berlin Heinrici ordered would not be defended. The capital of Germany would not become another Stalingrad as Heinrici told his subordinates. A decision by OKW on 23 April to defend Berlin in a final decisive battle forced Heinrici into direct conflict with his superiors over the conduct of operations along the Oder Front
- a conflict that undermined his capability to defend against the Soviets & ultimately cost Heinrici his comm&. In a companion volume to his successful & highly-regarded study of the Soviet assault on the city of Berlin Bloody Streets" author A. Stephan Hamilton describes the planning & execution of the defense of the Oder Front reconstructing it day-by-day using previously unpublished personal diaries postwar interviews Heeresgruppe Weichsels war diary & daily command phone logs. Operations of the 3. Panzer Armee 9. Armee 12. Armee & 21. Armee are covered in detail with their unit movements depicted on over 60 wartime operational maps. The narrative is supported by an extensive selection of appendices including translations of post-war narratives relating to Heeresgruppe Weichsel penned by senior German officers biographical notes on notable officers of the Heeresgruppe & highly detailed orders of battles. In addition to a number of bw photographs this study features 64 pages of operational maps reproduced in full colour."
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Odessa was the Russian Empires gateway to the Middle East its greatest commercial seaport & home to one of the most vibrant Jewish communities in all of Europe. Created as a model of enlightenment by Catherine the Great & developed by colourful adventurers such as Grigory Potemkin Jose de Ribas & Armand de Richelieu Odessa became a magnet for the artistic & the ambitious
- from Alexander Pushkin & Isaac Babel to Zionist activist Vladimir Jabotinsky & immunologist Ilya Mechnikov. Odessas reputation for nurturing feisty dissenters artful raconteurs & good-natured crooks cemented its place among Europes great cities. But in the twentieth century pogroms devastated the Jewish community; the Russian civil war brought refugees & new rulers the Bolsheviks; & during the Second World War Romanian occupiers killed tens of thousands of Jews in one of the untold episodes of the Holocaust. Drawing on a wealth of original source material historian Charles King paints a rich portrait of Odessa through the lives of its geniuses & villains revealing how a diverse cosmopolitan city turned against itself during the Holocaust
- but also how Odessas dream has survived in a diaspora reaching all the way to Brighton Beach Brooklyn.

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Can you forgive the past? It's 1963 & a young German reporter has been assigned the suicide of a holocaust survivor. The news story seems straightforward this is a tragic insight into one man's suffering. But a long hidden secret is discovered in the pages of the dead man's diary. What follows is life-&-death hunt for a notorious former concentration camp-commander a man responsible for the deaths of thousands a man as yet unpunished. ...

Odette Brailly entered the nations consciousness in the 1950s when her remarkable
- & romantic
- exploits as an SOE agent first

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I am a very ordinary woman to whom a chance was given to see human beings at their best & at their worst...I completely believe in the potential nobility of the human spirit. During some of the darkest days of the Second World War a young Frenchwoman living as a mother & housewife in England left her ordinary life to become a British agent working covertly in France to aid the Resistance. Entering a murky & deadly world of espionage & double-dealing she was betrayed to the Germans only to endure torture by the Gestapo & the hell of the infamous concentration camp of Ravensbruck. Yet she retained a compassion grace & spiritedness that mystified her captors; & living to see the liberation of Europe she kept in the direst circumstances her fundamental trust in goodness. ODETTE tells the moving & inspirational story of a woman who in her courage & her ability to hold on to hope was far from ordinary. ...